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Alisa Joseph, SVP, Business Strategy & Development at Whip Media Group, spoke to ttvnews about the company’s evolution, which offers one of the most complete data and business intelligence offers in the industry.
Born in 2011 in Paris as WhipClip, an app to legally store TV scenes in Gif format and reconverted in 2014 into an app for users to keep track of all the series they are watching, TV Time evolved again in October 2019 with the birth of Whip Media.
On that date, TV Time acquired the data company Mediamorph, specialized in monitoring content transactions between distributors, producers, platforms and channels.
With this purchase, TV Time was renamed Whip Media and came to control both sides of the content related data: the industry side and the consumer side.
“The acquisition of Media Morph took place last year and the objective was to really bring this massive amount of data that we had coming from consumers about consumption of content across movies and TV, and combine that with the billions of transactions point that Media Morph was collecting on video as well,” said Alisa Joseph, SVP of Business Strategy & Development at Whip Media Group.
“We knew that data was missing from this decision process across the board and we knew that licensing and acquisition of content was changing and evolving,” she added.
The new Whip Media was able to merge the two sides of data and generate solutions for the industry’s new needs.
Today, the company has over 50 clients from media and entertainment, including Disney, Warner Bros., Hulu, NBCU, Paramount, Sony, Lionsgate, BBC, HBO, AT&T, T-Mobile, Liberty Global, Discovery and United Talent Agency, to name a few.
The company also has over 150 employees and offices in LA, New York, Amsterdam, London and Paris.
What do they do with all that data? Basically, monitor content’s performance after its licensing and predict how well it could perform, or in which platform and under which format it would work the best.
“The vision was that we would build out predictive models using the data sets and all of this information for our clients in order to optimize the process of transaction around content as well as the prediction of success of a piece of content which is really what the industry is all about: How do we know that a piece of content its actually going to resonate with consumers?”, she explained.
“So the combination of the two pieces are really about that: being able to predict and be able to take that data and translate ii into what is next for the buyer side or the seller side.”
“If you are talking about the massive explotion of titles across the world, the decisions that have to be made are now more critical than ever and the pace in which they have to be made its much faster. There’s been a wave of catalogue content acquisition with the downturn in production due to the pandemic. Decisions there have been incredibly difficult because the amount of content on the shelve has been limited. And the great content has been swept up. Companies like Pluto TV, Disney+ going international… it’s like every single day we hear of a new platform, so we are in the middle of all that right now,” she added.
In addition, she said, Whip Media’s data can be used in a previous step: before production even begins.
“We actually work with the talent agency community (UTC is a client) and we have other clients in that mix. We have many clients focusing on using the traditional TV analytics data to look at actors, genres, what’s trending well on a particular market, and what it’s working in terms of platforms as well, because now we are capturing data on the platforms viewed. So the combination of elements can absolutely be used to address what I would call creation through licensing.”
Today many of Whip Media’s clients are either based in the US or are global companies with a worldwide presence. Its star app TV Time (which continues to be called that) is also widely used in Latin America (particularly Brazil) and Spain.
Through the acquisition of Mediamorph, in addition, Whip Media “inherited” many clients based in Europe, including companies with a presence in Spain.
And now Latin America is positioned as the next great objective of the company for this 2021. “Do not lose sight of us because soon there will be related news,” said Alisa Joseph.